Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Chevalier’ Review: A Music-Theater Portrait of Joseph Boulogne

      by

      “The Chevalier,” an intriguing music-theater hybrid, unwraps the still little-known life and work of this 18th-century composer.Now, the composer Joseph Boulogne would be hailed as a Renaissance man: artist, athlete, intellectual, soldier. Born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a white French plantation owner and an enslaved mother of Senegalese origin, Boulogne became a virtuoso violinist, prodigious composer, champion fencer, the general of Europe’s first Black regiment and an avid abolitionist.But Boulogne, a.k.a. the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (and whose last name is sometimes spelled “Bologne”), was a biracial man in a time and place that held little space for him, which means his remarkable life has largely been erased from the historical narrative, though that is beginning to change.“The Chevalier,” a trim hybrid of theater and music, seeks to revive his reputation. The show was written and directed by Bill Barclay, the artistic director of Music Before 1800. (Barclay also plays Choderlos de Laclos, a Boulogne collaborator and author of the novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”) A single performance at the eye-poppingly opulent United Palace theater in Washington Heights on Sunday served as its New York City premiere; it will be available to stream next month.“The Chevalier” starts rather unpromisingly. Barclay takes as his point of imaginative departure the few weeks that Boulogne and Mozart were housemates in Paris. Mozart, 11 years younger, grills Boulogne about his life story, and he responds with long, expository answers that hit on major biographical points — more school lecture than beguiling drama.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Patriots,’ About Putin’s Falling Out With an Oligarch, Is Broadway Bound

      by

      The play, by Peter Morgan of “The Crown,” will star Michael Stuhlbarg and is scheduled to open in April.“Patriots,” a well-received British play about a Russian oligarch’s ill-fated role in the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, will transfer to Broadway in April, adding a dose of international intrigue to a packed spring season.The drama, which the critic Matt Wolf called “gripping” and “coolly unnerving” in a 2022 review of a London production for The New York Times, was written by Peter Morgan, the creator and primary writer of “The Crown,” the Emmy-winning six-season Netflix show. Morgan has written two other plays that made it to Broadway, “The Audience,” about Queen Elizabeth II, and “Frost/Nixon,” about the journalist David Frost’s famous interviews of former President Richard M. Nixon.The Broadway production of “Patriots” will star Michael Stuhlbarg, who last appeared on Broadway in 2005, when he received a Tony nomination for starring in Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.” Stuhlbarg has numerous stage credits, but most recently has worked in film (“A Serious Man”) and television (“Boardwalk Empire”). Stuhlbarg will play Boris A. Berezovsky, a Russian business tycoon who helped Putin rise to power but then fell out with him and later died in exile. The role was played in London by Tom Hollander.Stuhlbarg will star alongside Will Keen, who will play Putin, now the president of Russia; Keen also played that role in London, and for that performance won last year’s Olivier Award for best supporting actor in a play. Luke Thallon will also reprise the role he played in London, as another Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich.The production is scheduled to begin previews April 1 and to open April 22 at the Barrymore Theater.The play is directed by Rupert Goold, a British director who has twice been nominated for Tony Awards, for “Ink” and “King Charles III,” and who will also be directing “The Hunt” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn early this year. “Patriots” was staged in 2022 at the nonprofit Almeida Theater in London, where Goold is the artistic director, and last year it had a profitable commercial run in London’s West End.The lead producer of the Broadway production will be Sonia Friedman, who is a major force in both the West End and on Broadway.The play will open in the final days of a Broadway season that is proving to be quite challenging for producers and investors because production costs are higher and ticket sales are lower than they were before the coronavirus pandemic. The economics have been especially hard for musicals. On Sunday evening, the producers of “How to Dance in Ohio,” a musical about a group of young autistic adults, announced that show would close on Feb. 11, after 99 performances. And last week, the producers of “Harmony,” a musical about a German singing group that ran afoul of the Nazis, announced that show would close on Feb. 4. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      How ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Became Their Passion Project

      by

      Kelli O’Hara and Brain d’Arcy James didn’t let the door close on their new Broadway musical about a couple undone by addiction.As origin stories go, the transformation of “Days of Wine and Roses” from a movie into a musical is a straight shot, with a twist. Kelli O’Hara and Adam Guettel had the inkling more than 20 years ago, when she was a Broadway ingénue, working on what became her breakthrough Tony-nominated role in “Light in the Piazza.” Guettel had written the music and lyrics for that musical, which went on to earn him a Tony Award for best score. They talked through their coordinating vision for evolving “Wine and Roses,” the midcentury classic of a romance ruined by addiction. “I think I used the words ‘a weird dark opera,’” O’Hara recalled.She already had a co-star in mind: Brian d’Arcy James, debonair and wry, like Jack Lemmon was in the 1962 movie, opposite the O’Hara look-alike Lee Remick. The film memorably traced the stuttery arc of alcoholism and recovery, a trajectory now familiar — onscreen and off — but rarely put to song.Guettel was not only game to try, he eventually brought in the playwright Craig Lucas, the Tony-nominated book writer for “Light in the Piazza.” Both had, separately, been facing their own addictions, in ways that informed, and sometimes overlapped with, the show’s development.The twist, then, is that, two decades on, the musical about a whiskey-soaked couple has actually arrived on Broadway — it opens on Sunday — starring O’Hara and James, now in the prime of their careers, with gorgeously matched vocals. The production takes pains to show the love that propels their characters’ relationship — however misguided it turns out to be.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 63 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Leave the Poor Princess Alone

      by

      There she is in her pink suit, pearl earrings and feathered shag.There she is with her upcast eyes, unknowable sorrow and perfect sympathy.There she is, that candle in the wind someone keeps relighting.Though killed in a car crash in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, turns up everywhere today, in plays, on television, in movies and even musicals. She’s entertainment gold: the perfect combo of stardom, tragedy and unanswerability.Which makes her, like a Dickens novel, public domain.In the last two years alone, I’ve spent more time with her than I did in the 36 she was alive. I saw her in a play called “Casey and Diana,” produced by the Stratford Festival in Ontario and now available to stream on Stratfest@Home. She was a spectral presence Off Broadway in “Dodi & Diana,” a marital drama that hijacked her story to lend oomph to its own.The 2021 film “Spencer,” which I rewatched on Hulu over New Year’s, did much the same thing, trying to wring some ichor of glamour out of her corpse. On television, “The Crown” hung the breathless first half of its final season on the buildup to the crash, blithely making stuff up where the record is thin. (Netflix justified it as “fictional dramatization.”) And what can one say about “Diana, the Musical,” which had a brief run on Broadway in 2021 (but an ongoing one on Netflix), except that it, too, died in a disaster?Reader, I cried at them all. (The musical because it was so bad.) I am thus part of the problem of her exploitation, seeking out more Diana content when there’s little left to say. Doing so establishes a kind of contract with the culture: In return for feeding my “feelings” about a celebrity, the culture has my proxy to do so however it pleases.But what right do I or any of us have to feelings about Diana in the first place? Quite profoundly we did not know her, any more than most of us knew pop-biography grab bags like Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leonard Bernstein, all of them falsified, fudged or “interpreted” in recent movies. History is not the point in such efforts, it is the impediment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Heartstopper’ Star Joe Locke Has a Soft Spot for ‘The Goonies’

      by

      “It’s the peak coming-of-age adventure film,” said the actor, who is set to make his Broadway debut in “Sweeney Todd.”Joe Locke was so moved when he saw “Next to Normal” at the Donmar Warehouse in London last fall that he called his agent with a request.“I was like, ‘I want to do a musical so bad,’” said Locke, 20, who for two seasons has played the sensitive teenager Charlie Spring in Netflix’s L.G.B.T.Q. coming-of-age drama “Heartstopper.”Soon after, his agent said he’d gotten an email from the casting team of Broadway’s “Sweeney Todd,” and the show was looking for a new Tobias Ragg, an urchin taken in by the scheming pie-maker, Mrs. Lovett.“The easiest way to play him is that he’s a bit simple — he’s not a full egg, as the Irish would say,” Locke said in a phone conversation in early January from his Manhattan apartment, before one of his first rehearsals. “But I think he’s a very street-smart character who’s survived in a world where people like him shouldn’t survive.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Tanya Berezin, Behind-the-Scenes Off Broadway Force, Dies at 82

      by

      At the Circle Repertory Company, where she said her goal was to “confuse people,” she nurtured a new generation of writers and actors in the 1980s and ’90s.By the mid-1980s, Tanya Berezin had gone far as a New York stage actress. She had collected glowing reviews for her Off Broadway performances over the years, and she had won an Obie Award for her role in Lanford Wilson’s play “The Mound Builders” in 1975.Even so, she was growing weary of the hustle. “When you’re in your 40s it seems really sort of inappropriate to be waiting for telephone calls from people to ask you to do a job,” she said in a 1993 interview. “It just feels really uncomfortable and childish.”Her budding career crisis turned out to be an opportunity. In 1986, Ms. Berezin turned her attention from the stage to a highly influential behind-the-scenes role in the theater world: artistic director of the Circle Repertory Company, a storied Off Broadway incubator of talent that she had helped found in 1969.Ms. Berezin died on Nov. 29 at the home of her daughter, Lila Thirkield, in San Francisco. She was 82. Ms. Thirkield said the cause of her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was lung cancer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Under the Radar at BAM: ‘Our Class’ Review

      by

      The story of a 1941 massacre is told through the lives of 10 Polish classmates, five Jewish and five Catholic, in this suspenseful but humane play.A simple staging idea can have a devastating affect.As audience members file into BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space and wait for “Our Class” to start, a man can be seen writing names in white chalk on a massive blackboard. It looks like a supersize version of the kind that might be in a classroom, but the list of names here are followed by birth and death dates. We are immediately, chillingly aware of each character’s life expectancy. So when we are introduced to Zygmunt (Elan Zafir), for example, we know that he was born in 1918 and lived to see 1977. On the other hand, Jakub (Stephen Ochsner) will die when he’s about 22, in 1941.That last year is the tragic turning point of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s play, which premiered in London in 2009 and, under the direction of Igor Golyak, is finally making a belated New York debut as part of the Under the Radar festival.Inspired by a real pogrom in Jedwabne, the show pivots on a day in 1941 when inhabitants of a Polish village killed hundreds of Jews. Many of the victims were burned alive in a barn. Afterward, the perpetrators claimed the Nazis were to blame for the massacre, a charade that went on for decades.The play (adapted by Norman Allen from Catherine Grovesnor’s literal translation) follows 10 classmates — five Jewish and five Catholic — through the years. One, Abram (Richard Topol), left in 1937 for New York, where he became a rabbi, but the others stayed put. Slobodzianek skilfully tracks people and events, giving the show a suspenseful but always humane urgency.Friendships ceased to matter during World War II, as classmate turned against classmate. Rysiek (José Espinosa) was among those lending a murderous hand on that fateful day, and he looked on as Jakub’s throat was slit open. “They were my neighbors,” Dora (Gus Birney) said. “I knew them. Just watching. Making jokes.” She and her baby died in the barn. Rachelka (Alexandra Silber) was Jewish and about 21, but, we know from that blackboard, died in 2002. How she made it through is a testament to the grim decisions one has to make in a war.It is tricky to bring this kind of tragic story to the stage, and the well-acted production from the Mart Foundation and Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theater is artistically ambitious. That is not a surprise. Golyak (“The Orchard” at Baryshnikov Arts Center) is among the most inventive directors working in the United States. His problem is one of abundance, though: He can have too many ideas and has a hard time editing them.The excessive stage business in “Our Class” often distracts from the story. Golyak unnecessarily frames the show as a play reading, for instance, with the actors in contemporary clothing, perhaps to suggest the timelessness of the issues. Mercifully he drops that conceit quickly enough.But then some scenes are overloaded with symbolism, as when the dying Jakub perilously and distractingly hangs upside down from a ladder, or when the characters draw faces on balloons, which then float up to the ceiling. Those could be powerful gestures on their own, but collectively they amount to a kind of aesthetic distancing, as if Golyak felt the audience could not withstand the story’s full horror. Tellingly, the most wrenching scenes are the more minimal ones, as when Dora quietly sings to her baby. It’s a lullaby, and a goodbye, the end of two lives and the end of a world.Our ClassThrough Feb. 4 at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      How a Culture Editor Covers the Kids’ Entertainment Beat

      by

      Laurel Graeber, who has covered kids’ entertainment at The Times for nearly three decades, shared her favorite stories and interviews from the beat.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Laurel Graeber grew up loving the theater and museums. But she never thought she would write about them for The New York Times — or that she would do so for nearly three decades.“I was an editor, but I always wanted to write,” said Ms. Graeber, who helped lead the Culture desk’s copy department for more than 10 years before she retired from full-time work in 2017. “And when the freelance assignment of writing our weekend kids’ entertainment column became open, I said yes.”She has written regularly about culture for young people for nearly three decades, spotlighting the best activities that parents or caregivers can do with children each weekend in New York City. She also writes features on new television shows, movies, museum exhibitions and podcasts for kids.“What I find most enjoyable is stuff for adults that’s also good for kids, but not necessarily geared toward them,” Ms. Graeber said in a recent interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More